Canon Shows the Most Sensitive Camera Sensor In the World 218
An anonymous reader writes "Canon announced today that it successfully developed a super high-sensitivity full-frame CMOS sensor developed exclusively for video recording. The new Full HD sensor can capture light no other comparable sensor can see and it uses pixels 7.5 larger than the best commercial professional cameras in existence today."
There doesn't seem to be a gallery of images, but the video demo (direct link to an mpeg4) makes it seem pretty sensitive.
pixels 7.5 larger (Score:2)
pixels 7.5 feet larger... that's quite a lot. No wonder it can capture so much light.
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yeah, a giant photomultiplier tube with sensitivity of one photon should do that job. if you want resolution, we can move it to a million different locations over the course of a week
Re: pixels 7.5 larger (Score:4, Informative)
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Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:5, Informative)
The newly developed CMOS sensor features pixels measuring 19 microns square in size, which is more than 7.5-times the surface area of the pixels on the CMOS sensor incorporated in Canon's top-of-the-line EOS-1D X and other digital SLR cameras.
I guess this is to collect more photons in low light conditions. Of course this means that sensor is physically larger, but that's not a problem for Canon, they have made medium format cameras in the past.
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:5, Insightful)
That need not even be the case. You could still do it in 35mm, 1080p HD video is roughy 2.1 megapixels, where as the EOS1DX is 18.1mp.
So there is definitely enough room to make pixels 7 times larger than a EOS1DX
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Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but then you would need special lenses. This sensor works with 35mm (full-frame) lenses.
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:4, Informative)
By "larger width" lens are you meaning larger aperture, smaller focal length or larger image circle?
All of these things have effects on the image and have practical limitations. (for example change the image circle area to be larger and you need a new format, all the old 35mm lenses they have can't be used for the larger frame unless you like black edges).
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In addition, the fact that making a GOOD large-aperture lens is difficult and expensive - moreso than making a good high-sensitivity sensor.
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Wouldn't it make more sense to use a system with a larger width lens to gather and capture more photons to increase the ability to get imagery in low-light conditions? Funnel more photons captured with a larger lens onto the same focal plane: more photons come onto the same pixel areas, leading to higher signal levels for the same stop and exposure time, right?
Why not do both?
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Except that 35mm isn't 'added for backwards compatibility'. It's still a viable format, it's still in use, it matches a standard professional digital camera sensor size and it's a common reference point across the industry.
Then there's
a 35mm lens
A 35mm lens has a focal length of 35mm. That has absolutely no bearing on sensor size; you can put a 35mm lens in front of a mobile phone sensor or in front of a Leica S2. It's still a 35mm lens.
Of course, you can also put a 35mm (35mm equivalent) lens in front of any sensor.
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:5, Informative)
It's a 35mm full-frame sensor.
It's also explicitly intended "exclusively for video recording" and mentions "full HD". Which would mean - assuming I'm reading between the lines correctly - that the resolution is 1920x1080 - ie. 2 megapixels.
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you'll want a bit extra for debayering.
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they use 19 micron square pixels. A "35mm" format is actually 24mmx36mm (or 24,000x36,000 microns). This works out to be 2.3 megapixels assuming no gap between the pixels. (ie, 1263x1895)
I've lost track of where things stand in the astrophotography world but this sounds like it could be very useful.
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IIRC there usually is a small gap between the pixels on a sensor - someone else has also mentioned that you'd want slightly higher resolution for debayering so it sounds like I was probably right - this sensor will produce images of approximately 1920x1080. But it'll be exquisitely sensitive to low-light conditions.
I think this is an attempt to be taken more seriously in the world of professional film recording - historically, companies like Sony and Panasonic have been market leaders here.
More than a few p
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:5, Informative)
After size, the big advantage of using 35mm is simply being able to use the overwhelming piles of 35mm lenses out there. If you have some big fancy camera you're going to need big fancy lenses. But if you can put the big fancy sensor in a normal camera, then you've got a whole new market there; people who can afford or already have 35mm lenses but can't afford all the kit for a bigger, more expensive camera. That's who this sensor is for. I can't help but think that it would be an excellent thing to sell to schools at only a nominal profit. Then students could buy an SLR-format camera with the same sensor and accepting the same lenses as what they learned on, when they graduated. Get a sort of Apple-like function going on.
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After size, the big advantage of using 35mm is simply being able to use the overwhelming piles of 35mm lenses out there.
Don't forget the benefits in physical camera size.
Don't worry, I promise, I won't.
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Agreed, but the sibling post says that the math can't work out. It sounds like a better consumer-grade camera sensor, not a professional one if it's not 4K (for a 2014-2015 product that would be essential).
This seems very strange - they just made larger CMOS sensors, as far as I can tell. So, yeah, more photons per sensor.
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The irony is that it's a step back to ye olde times (about a decade ago) in digital SLR pixel counts.
The difference is that they're using modern sensor technology, which means it's a fantastic idea for non-professional video (and possibly as a second-unit camera for some pro stuff). It'll even take stunning still photographs; they just wont look so great printed above around A4 size.
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Thinking about it some more, there is a professional space where it could come in handy - wedding videographers and the like. Anywhere where the light will be bad and there's nothing you can do about that, and there's not much need for post-production or delivery to any kind of device that runs > 1080p.
For those uses, the light sensitivity should be worth all the other trade-offs.
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course this means that sensor is physically larger
The sensor isn't physically larger. The specs say it's a full-frame 35mm sensor, and the photo of the prototype camera shows it with a standard EF lens mounted: a larger sensor would need medium or large format lenses, and it would be pretty much dead on arrival in the market if you had to go out and start buying medium or (God forbid) large format lenses to feed the thing. Half of the allure of Canon for video, after all, is that you can reuse your still EF lenses, and demanding huge format glass for HD video would be absurd.
The reason the photo sites are so much bigger in this sensor, presumably, is because the resolution is much lower than Canon's still SLR cameras. It doesn't give the resolution, but since it was only described as capturing "HD video," I wouldn't be surprised to find that the sensor's native resolution is that of 1080p video: 1920x1080 pixels, or about 2 megapixels. The 1Dx, on the other hand, has a native resolution of 18 megapixels.
So far, Canon (and more recently Nikon), have been allowing users to record HD video on their SLR cameras by scaling their massive native resolutions way down to a size that you can reasonably encode and cram onto a memory card in an SLR form factor. This approach, on the other hand, seems to be to build a sensor with a lower native resolution suitable for HD video at the same size as the larger SLR sensors, so you don't have to do any down-scaling and you get massive photo sites, which gives you a huge advantage in sensitivity.
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:4, Interesting)
Could not doing 3x3 binning on the existing 18MP sensor (if the controller supported it) produce similar results?
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:4, Informative)
That's the comparison you saw in the video. Binning is generally how the down-sampling is done.
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Issues with this:
1) Readout speed. I'm guessing that the 18MP sensor's readout speed is not fast enough to do 3x3 binning - instead there's a good chance that it only selectively reads pixels.
2) There's always a little bit of gap between pixels. As the pixel size gets smaller, this gap becomes a larger percentage of area.
A native 2.1MP sensor greatly reduces readout speed challenges and wasted intra-pixel space.
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:5, Informative)
They use another trick to take care of this, though: "microlenses", miniature optics in front of each pixel that channel light away from the insensitive regions (the data paths) and onto the actual light-sensitive pixels. A recent advance is "gapless microlenses", where nearly all of the light incident on the sensor winds up falling on some pixel or other.
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You don't get a huge advantage in sensitivity over treating a block of pixels like a single pixel.
What you do get is a huge advantage in processing power, because you no longer need to use so much of it. If you're never going to need higher resolution on the sensor, then it makes sense to just make bigger pixels, because then you can throw the scaler away (or just implement a simpler one to handle downscaling to even lower resolutions, if needed.)
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They already have processors that easily handle the processing aspect, so I don't think that's really it. No, this is actually aimed at improving the quality of the video recorded. When you use a whole bunch of tiny, high-sensitivity sensors, you get a lot of noise in low-light conditions. You just aren't getting enough photons hitting each sensor to create a good signal - highly variable, noisy images are the result. You can overcome this somewhat by averaging a bunch of sensors together, but you're basica
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What I'd like to see is a DSLR in which the mirror can flip in a different direction to expose one of these sensors under ultra-low-light conditions. That way you could choose, at the time you are taking the shot, whether to prioritize resolution or light gathering.
Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score:4, Interesting)
19-micron pixels seem big if you're comparing them to DSLRs, where everything has to fit into a nice little portable package. But it's not at all an unusual size in science-grade detectors used for astronomical instrumentation. At work [naoj.org] our instruments [naoj.org] use detectors with pixel sizes ranging from 13.5 to 50 microns.
I might be a little more impressed that they're doing this at video frame-rates, and without cryogenics...
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Freaking Amazing (Score:2)
This is just so awesome. As a Nikon fan, I'm a little upset it's canon, lol. But no, this is awesome.
(in before paranoia about big gubermint surveillance, etc, please go away, just enjoy the cool tech)
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Canon fo' life, yo!
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I'm more worried that a zombie Stanley Kubrick [wikipedia.org] will rise from the grave, wanting to shoot another film with available light.
(Lit by candlelight? Yeah, okay. Lit by a single stick of burning incense? That's just taking the proverbial.)
Re:Freaking Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the credits of Barry Lyndon include a special thanks to Zeiss for the lenses.
Just goes to show, it's all in the glass - you can have as many megapixels as you want in the sensor, but if your lens isn't up to it, you're throwing away the potential of all those pixels.
Re:Freaking Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
And you can have the best glass in the world, but if your sensor is from say a kodak dcs 620, that is just a complete waste. The whole system has to be suited, one weak link kills quality.
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i never understood nikon fans, because everyone else just shoots what they shoot without having any allegiance in particular.
in the age of lens adaptors, brand loyalty becomes a little bit weird.
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i never understood nikon fans, because everyone else just shoots what they shoot without having any allegiance in particular.
in the age of lens adaptors, brand loyalty becomes a little bit weird.
Um... In most cases, where it IS possible to adapt lenses from one system to another, major functionality loss is encountered.
You simply cannot achieve full functionality when using a Nikon SLR lens on a Canon SLR or vice versa. Also, going in one of those directions (not sure which), you won't even be able to focus to infinity. (Most MILCs have shorter flange focal distances so can mount any SLR lens and focus to infinity with it, but of course again with a potential loss of functionality.)
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Competition between Canon and Nikon has probably produced more advances in imaging than any other rivalry in the industry.
You're a fan of Nikon, but Nikon wouldn't be as awesome as it is today without Canon to apply the pressure, nor vice versa.
I personally own Canon gear, but I say to Nikon, BRING IT! The competition has been amazing and we are seeing beautiful things like this because of it. :)
"comparable sensor" (Score:2)
....and all CMOS sensors are inferior to CCDs for noise at low light levels, so this is just a good CMOS sensor. CCD noise, when cooled, is measured in electrons per hour.
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On the other side I haven't seen these in a standard video camera yet, I only know them from scientific detectors. Already wondered why no one was building this.
7.5 what? (Score:2)
You accidentally the units. 7.5%, 7.5x, 7.5nm...
Amazing but (Score:3)
Re:Amazing but (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the fundamental rule of how cameras function. Without such a limitation, you'd need incremental exposure timing/capture which I don't believe any sensor's can perform, then you need to actually process the HDR'ness of the image, which is quite frankly very subjective. One may choose to blind the viewer with the light shining through the window, or one may want to see the house across the street. This is an artisitic quality that needs to be supported regardless of which technology you choose. In the down to earth point of view, you may look into bracketing, which can at least support HDR from most decent SLR's, but of course even those techniques require two shots, meaning basically absoltely still shots. The real HDR shots are taken with prism splitters into two bodies, but that means two identical cameras with a custom expensive setup... Well, nobody said the perfection was cheap.
You are confusing it with dynamic range (Score:5, Informative)
Sensitivity and dynamic range are separate things. You can have an extremely sensitive sensor, pushing an equiv of ISO 12800 or even more, but dynamic range may only be 8-10EV
Even the best of the best have around 13EV of dynamic range(eg Nikon D7000) at ISO 100. As you increase ISO, the dynamic range suffers, and noise increases. Getting to above 14-15EV is very very difficult. You can do it in post processing(HDR combination of multiple exposures)
Re:Amazing but (Score:5, Interesting)
If dynamic range is important to you, you may be interested in Rambus' new technology:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2013/02/27/rambus-shows-binaryt-pixel-sensor-technology-for-expanded-dynamic-range [dpreview.com]
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The problem with the binary pixel solution is that it requires essentially a multiple exposure - so you will not get a clean single image. You can equally just take multiple exposures and use Photomatix or similar for HDR processing for the equivalent effect.
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I'm no fan of Rambus, but where do you get that? The link you are replying to repeatedly talks about single exposure, and a quick Google gives similar results.
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The problem with the binary pixel solution is that it requires essentially a multiple exposure
Well, the way I understand the dpreview description, it doesn't:
"Current image sensors are unable to record light above a specific saturation point, which results in clipped highlights. Binary Pixel technology gets around this by recording when a pixel has received a certain amount of light, then resetting it and in effect restarting the exposure."
Given identical exposure times, it seems to me that the binary pixel solution has a map of how many times each pixel was saturated fully in addition to the more f
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What you are talking about is called Exposure Latitude of which dynamic range is a component. Digital has quite a way to go before it catches up with color negative film.
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For improved dynamic range the sensors would have to have a mix of pixel sizes, mimicking film. I am having trouble finding my sources where I read about this, but I think I remember the essential details. Film is coated with photo-sensitve crystals that expose when struck by photons. The trick is that it does not matter what size the crystal is, the same number of photons will expose any particular crystal. So, larger crystals collect more photons than smaller crystals and expose faster. That is why f
Pics or it didn't... (Score:2)
Oh...I guess it did happen.
Still CMOS (Score:2)
Still has the potential for tearing during fast motion recording, as the pixels are scanned one by one, not captured all at once. Apparently global shutters for cmos sensors is uncommon.
Youtube link (Score:2)
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Still a pathetic 360p, I mean what idiot at Canon thought it would be a good idea to make a video showing off their new 1080p camera and upload it at 360p?!?!
Not the most sensitive camera sensor in the world. (Score:2)
Perhaps the most sensitive in its class.
It's a CMOS sensor. The sop end SCMOS ones are capable of photon counting with a quantum efficiency in the high 70%s. The best EMCCDs push that up to about 85% or so. With cooling, the readout noise is very low.
This may be an excellent standard sensor, but more sensitive ones certainly exist.
Large pixels are great for standard photography though.
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Note that the difference between 75% and 85% quantum efficiency is not that great. If the pixels at 7.5 the area of a competing CCD, then the CMOS would get (7.5 x 0.75 / 0.85 = 6.6 photons for every photon the CCD got; i.e., the exposures could go down by a factor of 6.6. Even if the CCD had 100% efficiency, that would still be a factor of 5.6.
This could be a boon in observing small asteroids, which are dim and tend to rotate fast (some less than 1 minute) due to YORP.
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Note that the difference between 75% and 85% quantum efficiency is not that great.
Not that great, but for low light stuff like astronomy and microscopy, you want every advantage you can get.
If the pixels at 7.5 the area of a competing CCD, then the CMOS would get (7.5 x 0.75 / 0.85 = 6.6 photons for every photon the CCD got; i.e., the exposures could go down by a factor of 6.6. Even if the CCD had 100% efficiency, that would still be a factor of 5.6.
Not quite. The size of the lens and more specifically the
Still photography? (Score:2)
I would actually like to see them implement this in a still camera. Cut the megapixels down to 2 or 3 (this is more then enough to put online and ), and make it 7x more sensitive than today's still cameras.
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I would actually like to see them implement this in a still camera. Cut the megapixels down to 2 or 3 (this is more then enough to put online and ), and make it 7x more sensitive than today's still cameras.
Why don't you just get an old 35mm DSLR with a lower pixel count?
I don't have any kind of SLR any more (trigger on my konica died, never had a DSLR) but didn't the old DSLRs have the same size sensor as the new ones, with less pixels? Seems like that's what you want. I've kept my 7MP Fuji super zoom compact around because it has the nicest lens of any of my cameras, so if I want to take a picture of something outside and especially at a distance it's nice to use. We have higher-res cameras, but I never need
Useful for more than just cinema (Score:2)
This sensor would be fantastic for microscopy. The current range of "scientific" cameras are woefully under-specced even compared to consumer DSLRs (tiny sensors, small pixels, high noise level even with peltier cooling). Canon can eliminate Leica from that market with a product like this.
Contrarily to most of the wailers here... (Score:2)
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NASA managers developed the TRL concept to cushion the statement "we're not finished yet." It is by far the most useless metric in industry, which is probably why DOD adopted it.
Nice... (Score:2)
So why have the not been upgrading sensors? Nikon is eating their lunch lately with Sony's latest also beating them. You have to hang your head low when Sony beats you.
All of the camera lines have been stagnant in the sensors and MP for years. the Rebel should be 24MP, the 5D MK III should have been 30+MP and the 1DS should have been upgraded to ungodly nearly medium format resolutions by now.
Nikon is doing that, Sony is catching up.... What the hell is wrong with canon? All I can see is they ar
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Nikon is eating their lunch lately with Sony's latest also beating them. You have to hang your head low when Sony beats you.
You do realize that the nikon d800 and d600 use _sony_ sensors right?
All I can see is they are busy adding flip out touchscreens and trying to convince people that its a "feature"
All they've been doing is making their sensors more sensitive yielding better noise at the same iso and higher iso settings to use.
The really interesting thing is canon are _still_ on a 500nm fab process for their full frame sensors. The old nikon d3s used a 350nm process and still couldn't beat canon. The sony sensors used in the d800 use a 180nm process.
This makes me wonder what kind of crazy things canon will come up with once they do s
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Dude I have a D5 MK III and a D800. and the D800 kicks the canons arse hard.... HARD.
the 5D does not have a better sensor for low light. in fact it looks like a lot of processing is happening in camera as it's pretty soft compared to the nikon.
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But the 5d3 sensor does have better low light performance than the 5d2, the post above mine implied canon were doing nothing with their sensors, which is false, they are being constantly improved.
You are assuming I said something that I didn't. It should come to no surprise that canons newer sensors are better than their older ones. It should also come to no surprise that using a feature size several nodes smaller could facilitate sony making sensors with better resolution and dynamic range.
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You have to hang your head low when Sony beats you.
Not really. Sony have been a completely mental company for some years now. They have frequently made the best in class hardware, let down by absoloutely awful software and butchered even further by the entertainment division wanting to assert their "rights".
Sony make excellent image sensors, such as the ICX series.
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Yes they will. I have all L series glass for my Canon camera and they can easily take advantage of it.
Please don't critisize the sensor (Score:2)
... and avoid sharply worded questions.
I thought the lossy part of MPEG... (Score:3)
...eliminates much of the information that humans cannot see.
(Which is why the big view screen on Star Trek probably does not use an MPEG codec... Klingons would think humans were weirdly colored blocky beings).
Video demo (Score:2)
Would have been nice to see the video demo in HD.
Canon-fanboy TFA Is a wildy misleading (Score:2)
The link in TFA that says it the pixels are 7.5 x larger than the "best commercial professional cameras in existence" actually points to a page that says:
Each pixel on the new sensor measures 19 microns square, more than 7.5-times the surface area of the pixels on the CMOS sensor incorporated the company most advanced (and expensive) top-of-the-line EOS-1D X camera released last year.
TFA therefore assumes that Canon makes the best cameras in existence. Excluding professional digital backs, the Nikon D800 has 4.88 micron pixels, which is 23.8 square microns--but let's assume that "microns square" means square pixels 19 microns on each side even though it specifically refers to surface area. 4.88 x 7.5 microns = 36.6 microns, which is ab
That's cool but it needs IR (Score:2)
If they could add an additional pixel that's sensitive to IR only and be able to switch it on and off, that would be really useful.
Re:That "full moon" "after" shot... yeah... no. (Score:5, Informative)
Err, of course the sky is blue under moonlight: it's just reflected sunlight, after all (but see below).
The problem is that the Moon is much fainter than the Sun and thus the overall light level is low. So low that it doesn't significantly activate the colour-sensitive cones in the human eye, meaning that you only really see with the rods in black-and-white.
But take a long exposure with a camera (or a video frame rate with this Canon sensor), and the blue will most definitely come through.
(Actually, the moonlight-illuminated sky is slightly bluer than a sunlight-illuminated one, as the Moon's slightly brown-ish colour first imprints its spectral dependence on the sunlight which bounces off it. That light is then Rayleigh-scattered off the molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, imprinting the well-known 1/lambda^4 dependence which makes the sky blue).
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Also to your full HD comment, the 5D Mk II shoots pictures in 3861 × 2574 which is larger then 4K... so if you can take the shoots as per my other post, 4K video is possible looking like daytime under a full moon if you can get something to store that data for you..
4K = 4096 × 2160 = 8847360 pixels
5D MKII = 3861 × 2574 = 9938214 pixels
--
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Re:That "full moon" "after" shot... yeah... no. (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially with the sky being blue from the full moon alone.
is the same as the AC who then posted this one:
I obviously didn't object to it being that hue, dumbass. I objected to it being *that* bright. It was a day shot. And obviously so.
then I'd say that's exactly what you did say.
And as for your assumption that I'm an American ... well, you haven't got a clue, mate. You're many thousands of kilometres off. There are other countries in the world where English is the native language, after all. "We have 2013" indeed.
Sometimes I really do wonder whether /. is worth the trouble.
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Sometimes I really do wonder whether /. is worth the trouble.
It's not worth trouble. If you're not having fun, play another game.
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no you sir are as gullible as fuck, go look at what a decent 7 year old DSLR can do under a full moon and report back.. Those of us that have them know its not staged at all.
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All DSLR's for as long as I can rememberer have come with the ability to increase sensitivity, or as the consumer knows it ISO.. My old crappy one goes from ISO 100 to 3200.. as someone else has posted current generation cameras can go up-to 256000
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I objected to it being *that* bright. It was a day shot. And obviously so.
What else would you expect a night shot from a highly sensitive camera to look like? What differences would you expect to see which you are not seeing?
Re:That "full moon" "after" shot... yeah... no. (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever taken a shoot with a 50mm f:1.5 on one of today's pro cameras? If you multiple the light available by 56 times (increasing the pixle size by 7.5) you are looking at a shit load of light.
I can shoot nice outdoor night pics under a full moon with just an F5 @ 5 seconds, drop that down to a F1.5 and that's more than 8 times the light, add this new sensor and that's 280 times more light! or about 6 FPS and note this is on a canon 5D MK I that's almost 7 and 1.2 years old..
Add in the current 3 and half year old generations improvement on the ISO and that goes from the 1600 I shoot at, to 6400, or 4 times the light and you get 24 FPS..
So thats with jsut the sensor.. If they where using F1.2 or even F1 lens and one would expect when showing such a beast and 30 FPS seems like no issue at all..
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Should not a 7.5x larger pixel collect 7.5x more light? It's 7.5x the area, not the linear dimensions.
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There's just that much area in a pixel. So there can only be that amount of photons coming in, no matter how sensitive your sensor is.
Here's the clue: these pixels are BIGGER than before.
Quite aside from that, I don't think we're anywhere near the point where we can detect every single incoming photon, so there's still room for improvement regardless. You may as well argue that there's nothing interesting about better solar panels, because there are only so many photons htiting them.
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We're a lot closer than most people think. A hell of a lot closer than we are with solar panels.
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Bah! Forgot link.
http://www.sensorgen.info/ [sensorgen.info]
Long exposures of full moon often turn out "blue" (Score:3)
Make it long enough, and the moon will look like the sun
Here you go, an example shot
http://tanveer.smugmug.com/Travel/Ladakh-2012/TSR/i-v7ZtdHc/0/L/DSC_5964_LR-L.jpg [smugmug.com]
Its all in the exposure
Re:That "full moon" "after" shot... yeah... no. (Score:4, Informative)
Moonlight is just reflected sunlight, you just need more of it to make the colours come out.
E.g. see http://www.flickr.com/photos/dansdata/3074862610/ [flickr.com] for an example - this photo was taken under a full moon, 30 second exposure.
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This was taken sitting on the top of the pyramid of Cheops in Cairo a few weeks ago.
Gibbous moon, 20s exposure - it looks like day.
http://travel.ninjito.com/2013-02-19-Egypt/SLR/qx-cairo-9.jpg [ninjito.com]
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... for when my 'subject' turns off her bedroom light.
Next time I'm with your mum I'll be sure to close the curtains
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That's about 1200 lines and this sensor is designed for video recording.
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Canon already do two still astronomy cameras (well, one since they discontinued the 20a), so it's quite possible this could form the technology of the next one they produce.
However, the 60da is already 30% more expensive despite having nothing more than a firmware change and the removal of an IR filter from the 60d. God knows what this would cost in a consumer technology, let alone a specialist astronomical version.
I think you'd be better off with a bigger telescope, to be honest.
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About the only claim on the Canon website I can find to that effect is:
"The light gathering area of the pixels is 160% greater than a conventional CMOS, for wider dynamic range and better low-light performance."
Nowhere does it promise some miraculous low-light effect. And it very much depends on what you class as a "conventional" CMOS.
And you can pay the same price for even a basic SLR Canon nowadays, let alone a HD camcorder, so I wouldn't be expecting anything miraculous from such a product.
My TV claims
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But, one big complaint I have is that my house looks really "bricky." I'll have to get someone on that right away.
Try using polygons. Or, if you use voxels, make them less than a meter square :)
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Stop, you're going to make it cry.
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well duh! cannons are noisy, especially those 42 pounders